Does research management and administration have a future?

Richard Bond - Head of Research Administration, University of the West of England

In ‘The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (2015), Richard and Daniel Susskind argued that increasingly intelligent systems will bring fundamental changes to the way that the expertise of specialists is accessed. It is argued that in addition to the digital automation of manual processes, pervasive media with embedded intelligence has the potential to replace human expertise, in particular, that of traditional professions which, by their very nature, comprise standardised bodies of expert knowledge at their core. Are we moving towards a scenario where academic colleagues will no longer contact the Research Office but simply ask Alexa instead?

This workshop will consider whether this is a realistic scenario for the future of research management and administration. In particular, it will explore the extent to which we need to consider how to respond to the rise of intelligent systems which, at the very least, provide the prospect of replacing the common knowledge shared by many individuals in the RMA global community.

News

We are delighted that 3 of our INORMS 2018 plenary speakers have been featured in the latest issue of Research Fortnight! Read articles by MIT’s Ehsan Masood, University of Nottingham’s Shearer West and Loughborough’s Dr Elizabeth Gadd. To find out more about Research Fortnight and access the publication, please click here.

We are delighted to announce that Worktribe are joining us as a Principal Partner to this year’s INORMS 2018 Congress in June. Attracting over 1,100 research leaders, managers and administrators from all over the World to the historic city of Edinburgh, the Congress will discuss many of the challenges and opportunities affecting the world’s research community. “We […]

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